Stay In Your Own Lane Letterpress Print by DesignHaus

This print is created using letterpress, one of the oldest forms of printing that often uses metal or wood type. The raised letters are inked and pressed into the surface of the paper, giving the print depth and texture.

Another one of shame’s sidekicks is comparison. I have a picture over my desk of the pool where I swim to keep my comparison in check. Under the picture I wrote, “Stay in your own lane. Comparison kills creativity and joy.” For me, swimming is the trifecta of health—meditation, therapy, and exercise—but only when I stay in my own lane, focused on my breathing and my stroke. Problems begin when I happen to sync up with the swimmer next to me and we push off the wall at the same time, because I always start comparing and competing. A couple months ago, I did it to the point where I almost reinjured my rotator cuff. Believe me, comparison sucks the creativity and joy right out of life.

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage had a very different definition than it does today. Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” Over time, this definition has changed, and, today, courage is more synonymous with being heroic. Heroics is important and we certainly need heroes, but I think we’ve lost touch with the idea that speaking honestly and openly about who we are, about what we’re feeling, and about our experiences (good and bad) is the definition of courage. Heroics is often about putting our life on the line. Ordinary courage is about putting our vulnerability on the line. In today’s world, that’s pretty extraordinary.

Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being. Over the course of my career, the question I’ve been asked more than any other is, “How do I take what I’m learning about myself and actually change how I’m living?” . . . I’ve come to believe that creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our being and become practice.

The phrase Daring Greatly is from Theodore Roosevelt’s speech “Citizenship in a Republic.” The speech, sometimes referred to as “The Man in the Arena,” was delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, France, on April 23, 1910. This is the passage that made the speech famous:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly." –Theodore Roosevelt